Idiot Labels

Follow me here… picture this:

You are in the bathroom, a little woozy from taking a dose of NyQuil, and your eyes are very dry (they get that way sometimes). You reach for the handy aerosol saline solution, sleepily apply it to your left eye, and scream because it is not your handy aerosol saline solution but a product labeled AIRDO which sounds really cutesy when it’s in the can but sounds like something else when it’s in your eye.

So you hop around squealing like a mad woman, disrupting all the people and animals in your household, while simultaneously screaming for poison control and washing your eye repeatedly with tap water. Meanwhile the people and animals stay out of harm’s reach, staring at you with open mouths.

Doesn’t that happen to us all, you ask? Of course it does... hah hah! …ahem… Which is why I think we all need Idiot Labels.

Idiot Labels will be a great seller. They can be sold in all the major outlets, like CVS, Target, and Joe’s Crab Shack. At first the individual consumer will be responsible for labeling his own things, but eventually we’ll have Congress pass a bill. Oh why not? They pass bills for lots of frivolous things, like:

· Therapeutic Horseback Riding in Apple Valley, California ($150,000)
· The recovery of Preble's Meadow Jumping Mouse ($500,000)
· $100,000 for the Alabama Quail Trail
· A tattoo removal program in San Luis Obispo County, California ($50,000)

And we ALL know how much we need Therapeutic Horseback Riding!

At first, the labels would be for the basics. They’d come in different sizes, of course, and they’d be in a violent red so they really stood out. They’d say things like “LOOK OUT, YOU IDIOT!” (this would’ve been perfect if I’d had it on my AIRDO can), and more simple things like “DO NOT EAT” (handy for toxins and leftovers), “STOP, LOOK TWICE” (something all singles would be required to wear in nightclubs), etc.

But eventually, after Congress passes its law, the labels could be applied to living things (no, singles in nightclubs do not qualify as living things). In some cases perhaps it should be tattooed onto the subject, in other cases a simple label would do. Here are a couple of the things that I think need to be labeled:

· Puppies (I’ll let congress figure out whether to tattoo or merely slap a label on them once they’re born). I know if I’d seen a label that warned me about how much poop and vomit BugEyes generated, I would’ve run like I was pursued by Satan himself.
· Wild Animals. Remember that idiot who got eaten (along with his girlfriend)? Timothy Treadwell had put out a book about how easy-going bears really were (“harmless party animals” he called them), and spent lots of time rambling about with them. Well, here’s the solution. Dangerous animals (like bears) should be tagged with large red plastic labels that can be read from 100 feet away. Those labels should read “WARNING: THIS ANIMAL REGARDS YOU AS SNACKFOOD.” If nothing else, all pictures that Timothy had taken of himself with various bears would have taken on a rather comic aspect in future cautionary tales.
· Career Politicians. Enough said.

And finally, I think we should put warning labels on all fast food drive-thrus. The labels would read “CAUTION: THE PERSON TAKING YOUR ORDER CANNOT POSSIBLY HEAR YOU PROPERLY. ALL ORDERS WILL BE INCORRECT AT VARYING TIMES”. Of course that wouldn’t solve the problem. But I have a solution that would. Instead of having a little speaker next to the light-up menu, why not have a keyboard where you could input your own order and thus make sure you got it right?

And, of course, if you pulled up to the window and found that your order still wasn’t right, you could spray them with AIRDO.

c. 2006